


Double Vision

by SophieAyase



Category: Tomb Raider (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, Legend Continuity, Press Start, Press Start 2018, Survivor Continuity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-05
Updated: 2018-08-05
Packaged: 2019-06-22 00:37:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15569889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SophieAyase/pseuds/SophieAyase
Summary: The Mirror of Spirits comes to life again, but this time, another Lara Croft exits it.





	Double Vision

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HostisHumaniGeneris](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HostisHumaniGeneris/gifts).



> Prompt: "Lara Croft meets Lara Croft. Through whatever mystical shenanigans you want to contrive, the classic dual-wielding adventure archaeologist and the rebooted climbing axe/arrows survivor meet."
> 
> Minor spoilers for Legend, Anniversary, and Rise of the Tomb Raider (main story); major spoilers for Underworld and ROTTR (Croft Manor DLC). The Mirror of Spirits comes from Lara Croft Go, but it's not really a spoiler as everything I describe happens in the first chapter of the relevant DLC.

No English manor house is complete without a few secrets.

Croft Manor, certainly, was no exception. Admittedly, Lara Croft had few people to share her secrets with anyway, and she didn’t feel the need to hide much from the few who had earned her trust. But even Zip and Winston weren’t privy to the story behind the strange triple-diamond-shaped mirror hanging in the gallery with her other favorite artifacts.

Winston, she’d reasoned, would worry about her sanity if she tried to tell him that she had, in fact, gone through the looking-glass to meet a shiny, purple version of herself. Not that she could blame him: she’d wondered from time to time if it had been an especially realistic dream. Zip was more credulous, having seen more of the supernatural circumstances around her search for Excalibur, but he was also more wary. He’d never gotten over Alister’s death - not that Lara had, but at least it hadn’t been the first time she’d met a doppelgänger. Or the first time she’d lost someone close to her.

She certainly wasn’t about to tell Zip about the pull the mirror still had on her. She couldn’t say quite why, but she adored looking in it. Maybe it was just the novelty of seeing her reflection split in three. But Zip would tell her, only half jokingly, that she should be careful because it was the mirror from Harry Potter. Then he’d worry about her, not at all jokingly.

So it was on a Sunday morning that she found herself wandering absently around the gallery. Winston was enjoying a holiday in Bristol that Lara had practically ordered him on; Zip was in London for the weekend. Ostensibly, she’d come in with a dusting rag to keep the room pristine in Winston’s absence, but in truth, she was simply bored.

Lara absently ran the rag over the edges of the Mirror of Spirits, not really trying to clean it so much as going through the motions. She smiled at her reflection: a confident, competent woman in her early thirties, her aristocratic grace underlying an athletic build. She gently dusted the face of the mirror, though as she thought about it, it never really collected dust. She let her hand fall from the mirror.

Another, younger woman looked back at her.

Lara startled. She was used to unusual things - centuries-old booby traps springing to life; magical swords opening portals - but when something happened so quickly, it was still a surprise.

The woman on the other side narrowed her eyes, as if trying to decide whether to trust Lara. Barely thinking, Lara reached up to touch the mirror, half expecting to be drawn in again. Well, adventure was always a good cure for boredom. Instead, her fingertips struck cool, smooth, solid glass.

Ah, well. It had been worth a try.

On the other side, the young woman - a girl, really - frowned, then mirrored Lara’s motion. Lara’s breath hitched as she felt a warm hand link with her own. In the next moment, she’d tumbled backward onto the floor - not very ladylike - as the girl fell through the mirror.

“Well, that’s a change,” Lara muttered to herself.

“I’m so sorry,” the girl said, quickly pulling herself back and off of Lara. Her accent was British, but not as refined as Lara’s. Still, it sounded well-to-do. “I wasn’t expecting that to happen.”

Lara chuckled as she rose to her feet. “Nor I.” She reached down to offer the girl a hand. “Well, if we’re going to make each other’s acquaintance like this, we may as well know each other’s names,” she said as she pulled the girl up. “Lara Croft.”

The girl’s eyes narrowed as they darted around the room. She returned her gaze to Lara, staring her down. “Who are you really?” she demanded.

“I told you. Lara, Lady Croft,” Lara said, as evenly as she could. If there was one thing she wasn’t used to, it was having her identity questioned.

“ _I’m_ Lara Croft,” the girl replied. “If this is a trap of Trinity’s, I’m not falling for it.”

“Trinity?” Lara was puzzled. Then a thought struck her. “What is your butler’s name?” she asked.

“Butler? I - I don’t have one. But when I was young, we had a butler named Winston.” The girl looked at her strangely, then seemed to catch on. “Yours?”

Lara nodded. “Winston. He’s away at the moment, I’m afraid.”

“Did you ever play pranks on him?” the girl asked.

Lara chuckled. “When I was young, I’d lock him in the freezer. Horribly cruel, looking back, but he took it in remarkable stride.”

The girl exhaled heavily. “My God.”

“Likewise.” Lara and the girl stood looking carefully at each other for a moment before Lara collected herself enough to recall the aristocratic tendencies Winston had tried so hard to instill in her. “Why don’t we have a cup of tea?”

* * *

Lara peered at the girl over her teacup. There was a superficial resemblance, true, but only a superficial one. The girl’s face was different, despite some shared traits Lara couldn’t quite put a name to. She could be Lara’s cousin.

Like Lara, she was athletic, but not quite as toned or refined, as if her muscles had developed from short periods of intense activity, not sustained training in a gym. She moved and spoke like a city dweller, someone used to compressing herself into small spaces, rather than a mansion at least two times too big for her. She was nimble, Lara would give her that.

“Why don’t you tell me about yourself?” Lara said as the girl lowered her cup.

“You first,” the girl said smoothly.

Lara smirked. “I believe _you_ came through _my_ mirror,” she replied.

“How do I know this isn’t some trick of Trinity’s?” the girl countered.

“Let’s start there.” Lara shifted back in her seat and crossed her legs. “Who’s Trinity?”

The girl sat silently for a moment, thinking. “I suppose if you are Trinity, you know what I know about you,” she said.

“I’m not. I don’t,” Lara cut in.

“Trinity is a paramilitary organisation dating back to the first millennium,” the girl said slowly. “I still don’t fully understand their origins, but they have some sort of tie to the Catholic Church. Their mission is to hide any myths that are contrary to established religious worldviews. Especially any myths that happen to be true.”

Lara smiled. “What is this, _The Da Vinci Code_?” She chuckled, but the girl looked back at her in silence. Lara sobered.

“I first ran into them on Yamatai,” the girl continued. “But they followed me to Kitezh. It turned out Ana had been spying on me.”

“Kitezh? The forgotten city of Russia?” Lara asked. “And who’s Ana? You don’t mean Amanda, do you?”

The girl wrapped her hands around her teacup. “You really don’t know what I’m talking about,” she murmured, more to herself than Lara. “And yet, this _is_ the Manor.” She looked up again. “It’s different, though,” she told Lara.

“How so?” Lara poured more tea into her cup, then settled back to enjoy the story.

“It’s not as run-down, for one thing,” the girl said, a bit sheepishly. “I’m still trying to repair the west wing. At least it’s not condemned anymore. I had a hell of a fight with Uncle Atlas to gain control of it.”

Lara frowned. “I don’t have an uncle named Atlas,” she said. “Only Errol. Bastard,” she muttered under her breath. “A real pity Mother and Father weren’t around long enough to give him what he deserved.”

“You’re orphaned too?” the girl asked. The sadness in her voice matched Lara’s. Lara nodded. “I found Mum in the crypt. Beneath the Manor,” the girl said.

Lara smiled sadly. “I _wish_ Mother were buried here.”

“Where is she?” the girl asked.

“She isn’t,” Lara replied. “She didn’t die so much as she stopped living. Then I had to kill the thing that had taken her body.” Somehow, she kept her stiff upper lip. At least that lesson in aristocracy had taken hold. “It’s gone now,” she added. “Vaporised, you could say.”

“I’m sorry,” the girl said, her tone genuine.

They sat in silence for a moment, sipping their tea and trying to ignore the awkwardness of the situation. Then the girl seemed to feel the need to change the subject. “What’s the strangest thing you’ve seen on an adventure?” she asked.

Lara smirked over her teacup. “Several living specimens of _Tyrannosaurus rex_ ,” she replied smoothly. The girl frowned, as so many had before her, but she seemed to be considering Lara’s claim rather than dismissing it. “The first was in Peru, while I was tracking an artifact that eventually led me to an extant piece of Atlantis.”

“Atlantis!” The girl gasped. “That makes Yamatai and Kitezh seem like child’s play.”

“Not at all.” Lara shifted backward in her seat as she crossed her legs. “The flashiest adventures aren’t always the most interesting. For instance, a— an acquaintance of mine discovered an enormous creature we could never identify in what should have been an ordinary dig in Peru.”

“What happened to it?”

“I killed it.” Lara lifted the kettle. “More tea?”

* * *

As dusk fell over the Manor, the girl stood in front of the mirror, studying it, tapping it impatiently.

“I don’t think it works quite like that,” Lara said mildly. “It will let you go back when it’s ready.”

“You make it sound like it’s alive,” the girl said quietly.

Lara shrugged. “Perhaps it is.” She sighed. “Why don’t I get some biscuits?”

She saw the girl’s small smile reflected in the mirror. “Thank you.”

Lara strode out of the gallery, back to the kitchen, where she took a packet of biscuits from the cupboard. Her eyes lit on the freezer as she emptied it onto a plate, making her smile. How long had it been since she’d remembered those childhood games with Winston? As she thought about it, Winston must have been perfectly aware of her schemes. He’d humoured her well. She’d have to send him somewhere more exotic on his next holiday.

Balancing the plate elegantly on one hand, she returned to the gallery, only to find it empty. Frowning, she set the plate on a display case and approached the mirror. Unless her eyesight was degrading, it was ever so slightly hazy, and glowing softly. “We didn’t even get to say goodbye,” she said wryly to no one but herself. She padded back to take a shortbread, broke off a piece, then closed her eyes as she let it dissolve in her mouth.

This, she decided, was another adventure that Zip and Winston would never hear of.

* * *

The next morning, she woke from a fitful sleep. All night long, or so it seemed, images of other well-toned, dark-haired women had floated through her mind. One looked startlingly like an American actor; another seemed vaguely Scandinavian; a third had a dreadful Gothic look.

Something in the dreams had suggested these were other images of her, from worlds entirely separate from her own or that of the girl she had met the day before. She shook her head to clear it and dismissed the idea. It was a dream; that was all.

Besides, the fourth woman in her dreams couldn’t possibly be another Lara Croft. Her chest was entirely too pointy.

**Author's Note:**

> I had such a ball writing this! My first fandom (© Fisher-Price) was Carmen Sandiego, so I'm familiar with incompatible backstories within a franchise - and with trying to reconcile them anyway. I'm pretty new to the Tomb Raider fandom, having only gotten into it around March of this year with _Legend_ , but I loved referencing different elements from different entries in the franchise. To be entirely honest, there's not much TR fic out there I like, so I'm glad this pushed me to create some of my own.
> 
> Probably the most overt references are in Lara's dream at the end (referring to Angelina Jolie, Alicia Vikander, AOD!Lara, and TR1-5!Lara), but as mentioned above, the Mirror of Spirits comes from _Lara Croft Go_. Winston's attempts to reform Lara into a real lady are drawn from Hillary in the first Angelina Jolie movie. And finally, the idea of Lara forcing Winston to take a vacation comes from one of the novels, _The Lost Cult_.


End file.
